Lolita Amrita Chitkariya, Gauranshi Srivastava

“AND THIS IS THE ONLY IMMORTALITY YOU AND I MAY SHARE, MY LOLITA”: TIME, MEMORY AND ADDICTION IN NABAKOV’S LOLITA

Amrita Chitkariya and Gauranshi Srivastava St. Stephen’s College

Nabakov couldn’t have been more right when he said –“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it becomes”. These words manifest themselves through his most celebrated work, Lolita. Notwithstanding the revulsion it elicited for its controversial content, Lolita has carved a niche for itself and has stood the test of time. Despite an immense amount of scholarship and extensive research, there haven't been enough discussions on Lolita as a journey of an addict and his negotiation with time and memory. This paper is an attempt at understanding how this negotiation is inextricably linked to the perception of time, how desire dictates this transaction and the role of the text in both channeling and immortalizing the memory.

Memory in Nabakov’s Lolita doesn’t simply exist as a recollection of a past experience but actively shapes Humbert Humbert’s present and future through the course of the novel to the point that it transforms itself into a mania. The novel, then, stands as a testimony to Nabakov’s belief that “a fully conscious self both fuels and is itself fueled by the ceaseless absorption of experience into memory, an on-going process in which past, present and future are figured in dynamic interdependency and not simply in succession” (Hasty, 226-7). The said mania is a product of Humbert Humbert’s overpowering urge to resurrect Annabelle’s memory through/in Dolores Haze, a memory of an incomplete sexual encounter/ “possession” (Nabakov, 145) that haunts him. Humbert’s refusal (bordering on absolute denial) to acknowledge the ephemeral nature and subsequently the impossibility of the experience he is out to recreate in all its details has strong undertones of addiction.

An addict loses the teleological sense of time since he or she persistently aspires towards the first-time experience of it and is always dissatisfied. Following from this, the addict rejects the understanding of time-flow as unidirectional and tries to extend the duration of intoxication through the famous refrain of ‘just one more’. Humbert Humbert is also seen as being caught up in this temporal limbo, inhabiting the past and the present simultaneously but never really living in any of these moments, as he attempts to recreate and bring his incomplete sexual encounter embedded in his memory, to a completion – “But that mimosa grove – the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since – until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another” (Nabakov, 14). However, even though he says that he has broken the “spell by incarnating her into another”, Dolores always falls short of becoming Annabelle completely. Further, Humbert’s trip with Dolores around America can be read as a desperate endeavor to extend the timeperiod of his libidinous high.

Following this line of thought, Avital Ronell in Crack Wars takes a step further and argues –“To the extent that drugs delineate the experience of experience as a moment which slips or turns away from responsible consciousness and self-stability, they offer a reflection of the non-present nature of experience whose marked interpretability follows lines of delay and reconstitution, forgetting and Nachtriiglichkeit” (Ronell, 56). Humbert’s addiction too constitutes his experience out of fragments of memory, as a sequence of events that are pieced together and framed and reframed in retrospect. In this, time becomes his substance of abuse as he runs against it to freeze Dolores/Lolita in time to satiate his desire. This idea will be further developed on towards the end of our presentation.

Considering Nabakov’s admiration for Flaubert and his famous speech on Madame Bovary, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say that Humbert’s addictive personality owes its influence to Emma Bovary in more than one way. Emma’s obsession with keepsakes to conjure up particular moments from the past, creating an illusion of time but failing nevertheless has strong connotations of addiction. For example, after the ball Emma attends, the cigar-case Charles picks up and she keeps, becomes a memory of the event but also an object to relive that experience. Further, her adventurous adulterous affairs with Rudolphe and Leon are also her frantic attempts at recreating the high of dancing with the Viscount at the ball. Like Humbert Humbert, Emma is also a victim of addictive temporality as Elissa Marder in her essay “Trauma, Addiction, and Temporal Bulimia in “Madame Bovary” argues – “…unlike the alcoholic, not only is there no twelve-step program to address Emma’s predicament, but the fluid substance that she abuses is not alcohol but time itself. Through the representations of time as well as verbal time (tenses) of representation…we can already read Emma’s free-fall into the addictive temporality that leads inevitably to her death and dissolution” (Marder, 60).

In this light, it is also interesting to probe into the question of genre of Lolita. Lolita is presented as a realistic account of a criminal or as it is also called, The Confessions of a White, Widowed Male. Humbert claims a ‘photographic memory’ while presenting his case to his jury that is the readers (Carter 1). The reader can be led astray by Flaubertian descriptions pervading the novel and Humbert’s control over the narrative. However, given the notoriously unreliable narrator of the memoir, Nabokov forces the reader to exercise caution and plays with the realism of the account.

Nabokov himself sees memory as an agential phenomenon. In his autobiographical account, Speak, Memory, Nabokov underscores his approach to memory marked by commitment to reason, humanity, genius. For Nabokov, involuntary memory is secondary and not the only avenue of communion with the past. Nabokov insists upon the “will's capacity to subject the past to its insistent call” (Reed). Thus, the active character of memory, the effort of recollection, the narrative insistence on the vantage point of the present, and the reinscription of the past's otherness are crucial aspects of both Nabokov’s autobiography and Humbert’s memoir. Nabokov weaves in this understanding of memory in one of the passages where Humbert recalls the image of Annabelle and Lolita:

“I remember *Annabel’s+ features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “thin arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita)” (7).

Carter goes further to comment on the similarity between the photographic nature of the text and Humbert’s eye as the camera lens in the dark chamber of the prison recollecting these 19

instances like camera obscura (4). It is interesting to note how Humbert’s description of Dolores is like a photograph in an attempt to freeze the nymphet in time, “I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita……..the word “forever” referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood” (43). Humbert’s memoir thus transforms from merely an autobiographical, confessional account into an addict’s attempt at immortalizing and resurrecting his experience.

James D. Hardy and Ann Martin in “Love, Time, Memory in Nabokov’s Lolita” go further to comment on the narcissism of Humbert Humbert where the memoir is not an immortalization of Lolita but rather an immortalization of Humbert’s desire. Hardy and Martin compare Humbert’s tale to Wordsworth’s “The Prelude: The Growth of the Poet’s Mind” which talks about the development of the artist. They note that the text of Lolita, that is, the entirety of Humbert’s memoir, is an anecdotal illustration of that first line “the “light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul”; a narcissistic declaration of desire (54).

Interestingly, Nabokov believed that he had the authorial power to recreate memories, “By writing, the creative perceiver is able to imaginatively fashion and ‘refashion’ memories ‘retrospectively, by the very act of evoking them’” (Green, 92). Picking up from Avital Ronell, the creation of experience for an addict happens through the framing and reframing of fragments. As Hardy and Martin also state, the memoir, a narrative form structured by time, is used by Humbert Humbert to illustrate how he has denied time.

Lolita, the nymphet, a construct of Humbert Humbert, is frozen between these pages like Humbert himself is frozen in his thwarted encounter with Annabelle. Moreover, Nabokov deftly brings the reader’s attention to the artificiality of this “very special memoir” by the unreliability of Humbert Humbert, “Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little” (86). Thus, Humbert’s legitimacy depends on the imagination of his readers. We write our stories but our stories also write us. Humbert’s memoir, a careful construct of his memories, is what keeps him alive. Not only does he construct this fascinating and repulsive tale which documents his life but also the figure of Lolita which is the pivot of this narrative. As stated earlier, Lolita was the incarnation of Annabelle for Humbert. However, Lolita was a mere stencil into which Humbert tries to fit Dolores. The creation of Lolita was the only way in which Humbert could relive his experience with Annabelle without dealing with the passage of time.

Lolita thus is an exceptional work which brings forth the fallibility of memory, a factor which is essential and relevant to our times. Collective memory is constantly refashioned to suit the needs of those in power. Humbert Humbert’s play extends beyond words, “Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!” (20), to time, to memory and finally to the gullibility of his reader. He transcends time and memory, immortalizing himself and his Lolita in literature and popular culture forever.

WORKS CITED

Carter, Courtney. “Photographic Memory in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.” 6 April 2017. Haverford College.

Hardy, James D. and Martin, Ann. “Light of My Life” Love, Time and Memory in Nabokov’s Lolita. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2011. Web.

Green, Geoffrey. "Visions of a "Perfect Past": Nabokov, Autobiography, Biography, and Fiction." Nabokov Studies. (1996): 89-100. Project MUSE. Web. 04 April 2019.

Marder, Elissa. “Trauma, Addiction, and Temporal Bulimia in “Madame Bovary””. Addictions. 27.3 (1997): 49-64. Web.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. UK: Penguin Putnam Trade. 2000. Web.

Reed, Matt. "Homo lepidopterist: Nabokov and the Pursuit of Memory.." The Free Library. CLIO. 2000. Web. 04 April 2019.